As fandom has expanded, the approach of writing a book covering a decade's worth of fan history in a single volume has proven impractical. Rich Lynch compiled extensive notes towards a history of the 60s following the approach of Harry Warner, but abandoned the project as undoable: The result would be a book too thick to be read and perhaps too thick to be printed. Even if split into multiple volumes, it would be uneconomic to produce and too unwieldy to be widely read. And it just gets worse in later decades.

Instead, we present here a series of articles which (hopefully) cover the main threads of the history of fandom. Naturally, 98% of the detail is skipped — though much of it can be found elsewhere in Fancyclopedia 3 — and important threads are missed or slighted. For this we apologize — perhaps you can help us fill in the gaps?

The time periods are approximate throughout, but are useful in anchoring a article in a logical place.